nosqlcouchdbdocument-storage

Limit to appending children to a document in NoSQL?


When an example of an object owning many children is given with a document database (like couchdb) it is always recomended that the children be appended to the parent object. In the case of a blog post, this means that you add all the comments as children of the parent blog post object.

post
{
    title: '',
    text: '',
    comments:[...]
}

However, don't you run into limits fairly quickly doing this? What if you're post has 800 comments on it? Wouldn't that be a huge waste of bandwidth and processing if you only showed 100 comments per page (though some people show all the comments on a single page). The same with forum threads or anything else that might have a large number of children.


Solution

  • While browsing some other SO questions I found a link to a blog post that explains the correct way to handle this using a more complex view that can solve these problems. Though this solution is specific to couchDB.